Grits to use affordable housing cash

A man walks up a lane after leaving Metro Turning Point shelter in Halifax this week. (TIM KROCHAK / Staff)

The minister of community services says she plans to spend more than $60 million in federal contributions for social housing set aside by previous provincial governments in Nova Scotia.

“The practice of the past has been to save money for a rainy day,” Joanne Bernard told a crowd at the Nova Scotia Housing and Homelessness Conference in Halifax on Friday.

However, waiting lists for affordable housing across the province show the rain started a long time ago, she said.

“It has been pouring in Nova Scotia for many years, in terms of homelessness,” Bernard said later outside the conference.

“We are going to spend that money. We are going to invest it. We are going to build and we are going to fix.”

The fund, comprised of federal grants for social housing, has built up over many years and is between $60 million and $62 million, she said.

“It is waiting to be used. When I was part of the community, it was a frustration,” said Bernard, the former executive director of Alice Housing.

“Now that I am minister and I am able to make that happen, it will be spent.”

In the 1990s, Bernard was a single parent on income assistance, searching for affordable housing. She said she knows first-hand the challenges people face.

On the job for about three weeks, Bernard said she is aware of the high expectations people have for her in her new role but she will need time to fix things.

Bernard said she has asked her staff to draw up an inventory of land owned by the Housing Nova Scotia agency in order to maximize opportunities to develop the properties or leverage them to increase the amount of affordable housing.

“I envision … working with developers to create new units and building developments on our own.”

Housing Nova Scotia owns and operates about 12,000 rental units in the province. Another roughly 6,000 units are offered through the non-profit and co-operative sectors. The province also provides rental supplements, said Dan Troke of Housing Nova Scotia.

About 4,000 people across the province are on the waiting list for affordable housing, Troke said. The majority of those are people who are about to retire or have a modest-income job and can’t find a place within their budget.

Halifax Mayor Mike Savage said the municipality is committed to helping solve the problem. Halifax and other municipalities across Canada are lobbying the federal government to reverse its plan to end $1.7 billion in annual federal funding for social housing units, he said.

A new Housing and Homelessness Partnership, which includes the Halifax region and other government partners, was announced at the conference Thursday. Its goal is to end chronic homelessness in Halifax Regional Municipality by 2019.

United Way Halifax is leading the partnership, which includes the municipality, the Affordable Housing Association of Nova Scotia, Housing Nova Scotia, the Investment Property Owners Association of Nova Scotia, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., the IWK Health Centre, the Capital district health authority and Shelter Nova Scotia.

Some grassroots community organizations and individuals expressed concern that they hadn’t been consulted or included in the partnership.

“This is a limited partnership. It really is not very inclusive. It is a hand-picked group of people,” said Halifax poverty activist Wayne MacNaughton.

“They need to include people that have had the experience of homelessness and include people that will be the tenants of this new affordable housing that they are trying to build. If they don’t do that, their effectiveness will be very limited.”

Statistics on homelessness in the municipality released at the conference Friday show about 1,900 people took refuge in homeless shelters in the Halifax area in 2012.

There are 4,184 public housing units in the municipality and 1,268 people on the waiting list for a unit.

“Currently, individuals are lingering for a very long time in the shelter system. We probably have about 10 per cent that are there for over five years,” said Claudia Jahn of the Affordable Housing Association of Nova Scotia.

“There will always be a need for emergency shelters. We would like to change it so emergency shelters do what they are supposed to do — just be there for an emergency situation for a couple of days. From there, you move immediately into housing options.”